What Trump Can Learn From The Man Who Built Israel's Border Walls

When it comes to planning a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, the Trump Administration could learn a few things from Dany Tirza, the man who orchestrated Israel’s barriers on the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula.

President Trump, in an executive order last week ordered the "immediate construction" of a border wall with Mexico. As the nation debates the plan and GOP leaders on Capital Hill look for $10 billion to pay for it, it's clear that Trump's mind is as made up on the issue as it was more than a year ago. “If you think walls don’t work, all you have to do is ask Israel,” said Trump in a 2015 debate. “The wall works, when properly done.”

I decided to do what he suggested, and ask Israel, which led to Dany Tirza, the architect of Israel's barriers on the West Bank and Sinai Peninsula. "It has saved so many lives," Tirza said by phone from Israel. "We had so many terror attacks before that nobody wanted to invest in Israel." That changed. Since his first barrier went up Israel's GDP has surged from $121 billion to $300 billion.

As a colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, Tirza was in charge of strategic planning from 1994 to 2007. During the 2000 Camp David peace talks between Israel and the PLO, Chairman Yasser Arafat took to referring to Tirza as "Abu Kharita," Arabic for "Father of the maps."

Soon after those talks ended without a peace deal, the Palestinians began a series of attacks that came to be known as the Second Intifada. The violence escalated into March 2002, when 139 Israelis died in attacks.

Tirza gave Hillary Clinton a tour of the West Bank fence, 2005. (Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images)

This triggered the Israeli decision to build a barrier on the West Bank. And soon Tirza got to put his maps to work as chief architect of the 450-mile "fence," as he calls it — only 5% of which consists of concrete wall.

The number of Israelis killed in terror attacks peaked in 2002 at about 450. By 2005, with the fence complete, terror deaths fell to about 60, and didn’t get that high again for a decade.

They had no choice but to build it, says Tirza. Israeli security forces had been stymied in their efforts to stop militants from crossing into Jewish territory because there was no established border. “It was a joke. When we caught illegals and terrorists, we couldn’t do anything. They would say, ‘Where’s the border? We didn’t know we were crossing into Israel.’”

For Tirza, that illustrates a key operational concept — the line on the ground. “People have to know where the line is and if they cross the line they are breaking the law,” he says. “People need to understand it’s not open to everyone.” It’s a psychological thing.

Tirza thinks the debate over Trump’s desire for a wall on the Mexico border is silly. This is basic stuff: “The people of a country have the right to choose who is coming to your country and who is not.”

Tirza was also involved in Israel’s 2012 move to build a 15-foot fence along its 150-mile border with Egypt, through the desert of the Sinai Peninsula. Before, the line was marked in many places by a ramshackle fence, and some 10,000 migrants were crossing the border every year. Since the new Sinai fence went in, says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, human trafficking has fallen 99% and cross-border terror attacks have stopped.

Netanyahu drew a rebuke from Mexico this week after he sent out a pro-wall Tweet: “President Trump is right. I built a wall along Israel’s southern border. It stopped all illegal immigration. Great success. Great idea.”

It’s more than just a physical barrier. Israel deploys a phalanx of other technologies along its fences, including balloons with cameras, infrared sensors and radar that can see for miles around. Seismic sensors can pick up on vibrations from smugglers digging tunnels. They even have unmanned, remote controlled vehicles that patrol the barriers. Most of the time they run on autopilot, sending back live video to base. Newer models are built on Ford F-350 trucks and feature remote-controlled machine guns.

There’s even been talk of maybe satisfying Trump’s wall wish with a kind of “virtual wall” built entirely of technology, in such a way that a physical barrier isn’t even needed. “Virtual fence? I don’t believe it,” says Tirza. “It’s not realistic. It cannot catch a man. And even if you do, what to do with him? He can just say he didn’t know he had crossed the border.” Back to square one.

Trump dispelled the virtual notion last August: “It’s going to be a big wall. It’s going to be a real wall. It’s going to be as beautiful as a wall can be, but it’s going to be a wall.” Trump advisor Rudy Giuliani said during the campaign that the wall would be “technological as well as physical.”

Tirza says there’s one more vital element to building a wall: cross-border cooperation. “It has to be part of a whole system,” he says, including authorities on both sides working to achieve shared goals, like halting drug smuggling and human trafficking. “At the core of the solution has to be coordination and cooperation of federal agencies,” he says. “There’s lots of intelligence that’s not being shared.”

“In Israel before we talked about building a fence, we took all these entities to one control room to manage them all together. You have to have shared intelligence. If not, then you’re building something that will not help the problem.”

Israel’s West Bank barrier fence cost about $1.6 million per mile to build. Its barrier across the Sinai was more like $3 million per mile. Tirza says maintenance costs are on the order of 8% of construction costs per year. Trump has estimated that a big, beautiful wall with Mexico would cost about $10 billion. That's about $5 million a mile if applied to the entire 2,000 mile border, or about $8 million per mile if Trump only addresses the 1,300 miles that doesn’t already have barriers on it.